IoT Platform Boom Creates Unseen Cyber-Physical Risk Layer

A silent revolution is reshaping global industry, and with it, the entire cybersecurity landscape. Behind the factory walls, within shipping containers, and across energy grids, enterprise IoT platforms are becoming the central nervous system of physical operations. Recent developments from leading platform providers DaVinci and Samsara reveal both the staggering scale of adoption and the emerging security implications of this transformation.

The Platformization of Physical Operations

DaVinci's recognition in the Forbes Digital Growth Enterprise Management Systems (DGEMS) 2025 list signals a milestone in industrial digitalization. The platform represents the next evolution of smart manufacturing, integrating artificial intelligence directly into production line management, predictive maintenance, and quality control systems. What makes DaVinci particularly significant from a security perspective is its architectural approach: a centralized platform managing distributed edge devices across potentially hundreds of manufacturing sites globally.

Simultaneously, Samsara's third-quarter fiscal year 2026 results demonstrate parallel growth in logistics and fleet management. Reporting over 40% year-over-year revenue growth, Samsara now connects millions of assets—from vehicles to refrigeration units—through its cloud platform. The company's expansion into AI-driven video-based safety and operational efficiency tools creates dense data ecosystems where video feeds, sensor data, GPS coordinates, and maintenance records converge.

The Invisible Backbone Problem

These platforms collectively form what security researchers are calling 'the invisible backbone'—critical infrastructure that operates outside traditional IT visibility yet controls physical world outcomes. Unlike conventional enterprise software, IoT platforms bridge the digital-physical divide, meaning a security compromise has immediate real-world consequences.

The risk profile is multidimensional. First, there's the aggregation risk: platforms consolidate access to thousands of devices under single management consoles. A breach of DaVinci's platform could theoretically give attackers control over multiple manufacturing plants. Second, there's the supply chain amplification effect: Samsara's platform connects to countless third-party sensors and devices, each potentially introducing vulnerabilities. Third, and most concerning, is the convergence attack surface: these platforms blend IT networking with operational technology (OT) protocols, creating hybrid environments where neither IT security tools nor traditional OT security approaches are fully adequate.

Emerging Threat Vectors

The cybersecurity implications extend beyond conventional data breaches. Several novel threat vectors are emerging:

1. Platform-Scale Disruption: Attackers targeting the platform itself could simultaneously disable operations across multiple organizations. Unlike single-factory attacks, platform compromises offer threat actors leverage at unprecedented scale.

1. AI Manipulation Attacks: As these platforms increasingly incorporate AI for decision-making (predictive maintenance, route optimization, quality control), adversaries could attempt to poison training data or manipulate models to cause physical failures while avoiding detection.

1. Converged Environment Exploits: The blending of IT and OT networks creates unique vulnerabilities. Attackers can potentially pivot from corporate IT systems through the IoT platform into critical control systems, bypassing air-gapped protections that previously separated these domains.

1. Third-Party Integration Risks: Most platforms support extensive third-party integrations through APIs and SDKs. Each integration represents a potential entry point, and the compromise of a single third-party component could cascade through the entire platform ecosystem.

The Security Gap

Current cybersecurity practices are struggling to adapt. Traditional IT security focuses on confidentiality and integrity of data, while OT security prioritizes availability and safety of physical processes. IoT platforms demand all four simultaneously. Furthermore, the cloud-native architecture of most modern platforms introduces shared responsibility complexities—while the provider secures the cloud infrastructure, customers remain responsible for securing their configurations, integrations, and edge devices.

The regulatory landscape is also lagging. Most industrial cybersecurity regulations focus on individual facilities or specific sectors, not on the platform layer that now connects them. This creates governance gaps where responsibility for cross-platform, multi-organization incidents remains unclear.

Toward a New Security Paradigm

Addressing these challenges requires fundamental shifts in security thinking:

• Platform-Centric Security Models: Security must be designed around the platform architecture itself, not just the individual components. This includes platform-level threat detection, centralized identity management across IT-OT boundaries, and security controls that understand both data flows and physical process implications.

• Zero Trust for Physical Operations: The zero trust principle of 'never trust, always verify' must extend to device-to-platform and platform-to-physical system communications. Every transaction between a sensor and platform, or between the platform and an actuator, requires authentication and authorization verification.

• Resilience by Design: Given the inevitability of some breaches, platforms must be designed to maintain 'safe mode' operations during compromises. This includes segmentation that limits blast radius, fail-secure mechanisms for critical controls, and manual override capabilities that don't depend on digital platform availability.

• Cross-Organizational Security Collaboration: As platforms connect multiple enterprises, traditional organizational security boundaries become irrelevant. Information sharing about threats, vulnerabilities, and incidents must occur across platform participants, potentially through the platform providers themselves as trusted intermediaries.

The Road Ahead

The growth trajectory of enterprise IoT platforms shows no signs of slowing. As DaVinci, Samsara, and their competitors continue expanding, the security community faces a race against time to develop appropriate safeguards. This isn't merely about protecting data—it's about ensuring the continuity and safety of the physical operations that underpin global economies.

Organizations adopting these platforms must move beyond checkbox compliance and vendor security assurances. They need to conduct platform-specific risk assessments, demand transparency about security architectures, and develop incident response plans that account for both digital and physical consequences. Meanwhile, security researchers must prioritize understanding these emerging attack surfaces, developing testing methodologies for platform-scale systems, and contributing to standards that can keep pace with technological convergence.

The invisible backbone is already in place, quietly reshaping how the world operates. Making it visible—and secure—represents one of the most critical cybersecurity challenges of this decade.